Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of Americans: study

Re:Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of... by lern_too_spel on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @11:26AM (#30601748)

Economics has a term for this: negative externalities. A buys a snowblower from B, gaining 4 health for not shoveling and reducing everybody's health by 3 from pollution. B buys a leaf blower from C, gaining 4 health from not raking and reducing everybody's health by 3 from pollution. C buys a lawnmower from A, gaining 4 health from not scything and reducing everybody's health by 3. Each seller gets 4 health from the money. Every trade is beneficial to both parties by 1 health unit, but now, everybody is worse off by 1 health unit than they would be had the trades not happened. In practice, we're usually D-Z, who participated in no trades and get a net reduction in health of 9.

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Re:Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of... by throwaway0a5e on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @11:58AM (#30602235)

That is an incredibly naive way of looking at it.

The way it usually goes is "everyone is +5, except the village that shares the watershed with the mine"

On anything but the shortest timeline things like like wealth, health and productivity are fungible at the societal level.

If the net cumulative effect of the externalities wasn't smaller than the benefits of the progress then the progress wouldn't happen because more people would be worse off and things would grind to a halt because the gains would be more than offset.

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Re:Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of... by lern_too_spel on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @12:12PM (#30602439)

Not only is it not naive, but avoiding these scenarios woth market regulation is one of the main purposes of modern government. Hence, vaccination policies and CFC regulation. Libertarians like to believe that negative externalities and other market failures don't exist, that the invisible hand is always benevolent, but examples abound for those who do not follow a religion that forbids them from noticing.

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Re:Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of... by throwaway0a5e on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @12:24PM (#30602630)

>Not only is it not naive, but avoiding these scenarios woth market regulation is one of the main purposes of modern government. Hence, vaccination policies and CFC regulation. Libertarians like to believe that negative externalities and other market failures don't exist, that the invisible hand is always benevolent, but examples abound for those who do not follow a religion that forbids them from noticing.

It's still naive, or maybe obtuse. Repeating the "negative externality" buzzword doesn't give you a blank check to peddle your preferred ideology (government intervention/regulation) while crapping on the other team.

Without regulation we get lithium batteries and a couple dozen poisoned watersheds.

With regulation we get slightly more expensive batteries and fewer poisoned watersheds.

Regardless of how you or I or anyone else feels about regulation it's somewhere between farcical and deceitful to pretend that the economic activity in both of those situations doesn't help more than it hurts. If it didn't work this way progress would grind to a halt because the increased material wealth of having the batteries would be more than cancelled out by the problems that poisoned watersheds create, to run with the existing example.

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Re:Lead exposure in last century shrunk IQ scores of half of... by lern_too_spel on Tuesday March 08, 2022 @01:56PM (#30604380)

Examples where most people are worse off are easy to think of. I gave an example where everybody is worse off because it is an interesting scenario. I made no claim about how often that situation occurs. There is no reason for overall progress to grind to a halt — the Nash equilibria for a game can be arbitrarily bad. There is only the obvious conclusion that governments should get involved to fix these problems when they occur, including regulating lead use, given that we see plenty of governments that have not and have suffered the consequences.

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